Irrelevant Cultural Influences on Belief

Recent work in psychology on ‘cultural cognition’ suggests that our cultural background drives our attitudes towards a range of politically contentious issues in science such as global warming. This work is part of a more general attempt to investigate the ways in which our wants, wishes and desires impact on our assessments of information, events and theories. Put crudely, the idea is that we confirm our assessments of the evidence for and against scientific theories with clear political relevance to our pre‐existing political beliefs and convictions. In this article, I explore the epistemological consequences of cultural cognition. What does it mean for the rationality of our beliefs about issues such as global warming? I argue for an unsettling conclusion. Not only are those on the ‘political right’ who reject the scientific consensus on issues like global warming unjustified in doing so, some of those on the ‘political left’ who accept the consensus are also unjustified in doing so. I finish by addressing the practical implications of my conclusions.     

Irrelevant Alternatives and Frankfurt Counterfactuals

In rejecting the Principle of AlternatePossibilities (PAP), Harry Frankfurt makes useof a special sort of counterfactual of thefollowing form: ``he wouldn't have doneotherwise even if he could have'. Recently,other philosophers (e.g., Susan Hurley (1999,2003) and Michael Zimmerman (2002)) haveappealed to a special class of counterfactualsof this same general form in defending thecompatibility of determinism andresponsibility. In particular, they claim thatit can be true of agents that even if they aredetermined, and so cannot do otherwise, theywouldn't have done otherwise even if they couldhave. Using as a central case an argument ofSusan Hurley's, I point out that thecounterfactuals in question are both``interlegal' and ``indeterministic', and I raisedoubts about whether this special class ofcounterfactuals have clear truth conditions. Finally I suggest that acknowledging thesepoints leads to an appreciation of the realstrength of Frankfurt-style examples.     

Permission to Believe: Why Permissivism Is True and What It Tells Us About Irrelevant Influences on Belief

In this paper, I begin by defending permissivism: the claim that, sometimes, there is more than one way to rationally respond to a given body of evidence. Then I argue that, if we accept permissivism, certain worries that arise as a result of learning that our beliefs were caused by the communities we grew up in, the schools we went to, or other irrelevant influences dissipate. The basic strategy is as follows: First, I try to pinpoint what makes irrelevant influences worrying and I come up with two candidate principles. I then argue that one principle should be rejected because it is inconsistent with permissivism. The principle we should accept implies that it is sometimes rational to maintain our beliefs, even upon learning that they were caused by irrelevant influences.     

Irrelevant speech effects and statistical learning

Immediate serial recall of visually presented verbal stimuli is impaired by the presence of irrelevant auditory background speech, the so-called irrelevant speech effect. Two of the three main accounts of this effect place restrictions on when it will be observed, limiting its occurrence either to items processed by the phonological loop (the phonological loop hypothesis) or to items that are not too dissimilar from the irrelevant speech (the feature model). A third, the object-oriented episodic record (O-OER) model, requires only that the memory task involves seriation. The present studies test these three accounts by examining whether irrelevant auditory speech will interfere with a task that does not involve the phonological loop, does not use stimuli that are compatible with those to be remembered, but does require seriation. Two experiments found that irrelevant speech led to lower levels of performance in a visual statistical learning task, offering more support for the O-OER model and posing a challenge for the other two accounts.     

Irrelevant speech effects and sequence learning

The irrelevant speech effect is the finding that performance on serial recall tasks is impaired by the presence of irrelevant background speech. According to the object-oriented episodic record (O-OER) model, this impairment is due to a conflict of order information from two different sources: the seriation of the irrelevant speech and the rehearsal of the order of the to-be-remembered items. We tested the model's prediction that irrelevant speech should impair performance on other tasks that involve seriation. Experiments 1 and 2 verified that both an irrelevant speech effect and a changing state effect would obtain in a between-subjects design in which a standard serial recall measure was used, allowing employment of a between-subjects design in subsequent experiments. Experiment 3 showed that performance on a sequence-learning task was impaired by the presence of irrelevant speech, and Experiment 4 verified that performance is worse when the irrelevant speech changes more (the changing state effect). These findings support the prediction made by the O-OER model that one essential component to the irrelevant speech effect is serial order information.     

Irrelevant Information and Mediated Intertemporal Choice

Results from 4 experiments suggest that currencies such as loyalty‐program points are overvalued. Different allocations of the same quantity of points across the same number of purchases (e.g., 100 points for each first, 200 for each second, 300 for each third purchase vs. 200 for each first, second, and third purchase) yielded irrelevant trends and should have led participants to ignore loyalty points as a basis for choice. However, choices were influenced by points even when consumers were provided with other truly discriminating information (e.g., price) and the irrelevance of the loyalty points was readily discernable. This implies that irrelevant information can influence choice when other, easily justifiable bases for decisions are available and, therefore, that irrelevant information can function as more than a tie‐breaker. Other implications for research on irrelevant attributes, medium effects, intertemporal choice, and loyalty programs are discussed.     

Irrelevant Pictures in Visual Working Memory

The aim of the paper is to establish firmly the phenomenon of an irrelevant picture effect and to demonstrate that the phenomenon can be used to investigate the characteristics of the visuo-spatial sketchpad. Experiment 1 introduces the use of dynamic visual noise as an interfering technique. This technique is shown to cause interference with a word list learned under visual mnemonic mediation instructions but to cause no interference when the word list is learned under verbal mediation instructions. Experiment 2 serves both to replicate this selective interference effect and to illustrate how the dynamic visual noise technique can be used to characterize further the nature of interference in the visuo-spatial sketchpad. Experiment 3 confirms the robustness of the dynamic visual noise technique. Additionally, this experiment demonstrates a double dissociation between two types of interference, dynamic visual noise and irrelevant speech, and two types of mediation, rote and visual mnemonic.     

Inhibiting Irrelevant Information in Malingered Amnesia

The Psychological Record - Two groups of undergraduates received simulated amnesia instructions that either informed them how amnesics perform on memory tasks (informed; n = 11) or did not inform...     

Irrelevant auditory attention shifts prime corresponding responses

In this paper we investigate whether an attention shift towards an auditory signal, while performing a two-choice serial reaction time task, primes responses in the direction of the auditory signal. In Experiment 1, subjects had to react to the pitch of the signal, which was randomly presented to the left or right ear. A short (50-ms) and a long (1000-ms) response-stimulus interval (RSI) was used. In Experiment 2 with an RSI of 2000 ms, subjects had to respond to the color of a centrally presented visual stimulus, while a sound was presented to one of the ears. In the short RSI condition of Experiment 1, there was a Simon effect for location alternations only. In the long RSI condition, there was a Simon effect for location repetitions and alternations. Experiment 2 showed a Simon effect in relation to the accessory sound. The results of this study suggest that an attention shift is a sufficient and necessary condition in order to observe a Simon effect. Preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the National Fund for Scientific Research, Flanders, Belgium (FWO-VL G.0009.99)     

Irrelevant speech eliminates the word length effect

Theword length effect refers to the observation that memory is better for short than for long words. Theirrelevant speech effect refers to the finding that memory is better when items are presented against a quiet background than against one with irrelevant speech. According to Baddeley’s (1986, 1994) working memory, these variables should not interact: The word length effect arises from rehearsal by the articulatory control process, whereas irrelevant speech reduces recall through interference in the phonological store. Four experiments demonstrate that, like articulatory suppression, irrelevant speech eliminates the word length effect for both visual and auditory items. These results (1) provide further evidence against the ability of working memory to explain the word length and irrelevant speech effects and (2) confirm a specific prediction of Nairne’s (1990) feature model.     

无关声音效应研究述评

无关声音效应是在对注意与记忆进行研究时所发现的一个现象,有益于探讨噪音等无关声音刺激对个体认知过程、工作绩效及身心健康的影响作用。在简要回顾ISE现象的界定与理论解释争论的基础上,重点从对刺激强度不同的ISE现象之理论分析、应用价值及一些相关的近期研究方面作了介绍,从对ISE现象的理论解释、无关声音刺激的选取、研究方法的综合使用、ISE现象中的个体差异等方面做了展望。     

运动觉、布局无关运动与路径整合

路径整合是空间导航的一个重要子领域。本研究采用了一种三角形完成任务的新变式来研究路径整合问题，发现在剥夺被试的视觉输入的前提下，去除被试部分运动觉后，其绩效有不同水平的下降；同时还发现在编码过程中与路径布局无关的不同方向旋转间并无显著性差异。此外，由于本研究是在室外空间中所做的现场研究，故得到的结果优于室内所做的经典研究，进而验证了前人的一个猜测。     

Influence of Irrelevant Speech on Standardized Test Performance

The aim of this study was to estimate the impact of distraction on standardized test performance. The distraction investigated here was from fellow examinees who were taking a speaking test. Study participants were volunteers (N = 171) who had previously taken the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) General Test, or the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). They were invited to retake a different form of the same test under either distracting conditions or standard, distraction-free conditions. Test takers expressed strong negative perceptions about the distraction caused by fellow test takers. The impact on actual test performance, however, was slight in the GMAT sample and negligible in both the GRE and TOEFL samples. Moreover, the influence of distraction was no greater than that associated with other common, undesirable influences.